Not THAT kind of COACHING!
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a profession like this?” No one has actually asked me that question, though I think a few of my friends have thought it, and I know I have. People know me to be all about heart change, not behavioral modification, about gospel transformation, not the American religion of “bootstrap-pulling.” “Is coaching even biblical?” some folks are wondering.
Not necessarily. There is a kind of coaching that believes in the basic goodness of humanity and suggests we can look within to find the power to live a life we design.
That, thankfully, is NOT the only coaching approach. I coach because I believe we have a story in which we are called to live. I coach because I believe there is freedom in Christ Jesus to live more fully in this story. I coach because I love being a part of people growing in their capacity to learn, live, and love in their unique story.
Because there is so much misunderstanding about coaching, I’m always on the lookout for helpful ways to describe the process. Recently, I returned to Proverbs for a thorough study. Eugene Peterson’s words danced off the page, inviting me to join in.
Listen to his words. Coaching is all about walking alongside a person as they grow in the wisdom to “live skillfully in whatever conditions we find ourselves.”
Many people think that what’s written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven – getting right with God, saving their eternal souls. It does have to do with that, of course, but not mostly. It is equally concerned with living on this earth – living well, living in robust sanity. In our Scriptures, heaven is not the primary concern, to which earth is a tagalong afterthought. “On earth as it is in heaven” is Jesus’ prayer.
Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves in.
Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work, and exercising leadership using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace.
Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do.
Proverbs concentrates on these concerns more than any other book in the Bible. Attention to the here and now is everywhere present. Proverbs distills it all into riveting images that keep us connected in holy obedience to the ordinary.” Eugene Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible with Its Translator
